#162: How to Be Tim Ferriss - Featuring Freakonomics

This episode is a role-reversal. I flew to New York City and sat down with Stephen J. Dubner (@freakonomics https://twitter.com/freakonomics) of Freakonomics http://freakonomics.com/ fame. He proceeded to ask me all sorts of questions that I'd never heard before, and we recorded the entire thing. It was a blast. His team did an incredible job with post-production, and I wanted to share the conversation with all of you. You can learn more about Stephen J. Dubner and his team at Freakonomics.com http://freakonomics.com/, on Twitter https://twitter.com/freakonomics, or you can subscribe to their show on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519?mt=2. Without further preamble, please enjoy this wide-ranging and sometimes-weird conversation with Stephen J. Dubner! Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you Gymnastic Bodies https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment. Coach Sommer http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/09/the-secrets-of-gymnastic-strength-training/ appeared on a previous episode of the podcast http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/09/the-secrets-of-gymnastic-strength-training/, which turned into a sleeper hit. He is the former USA national team coach for men's gymnastics and creator of this bodyweight-based training system. I'm not easily impressed, and I have been completely blown away by the sophistication and the elegance of his programming. I have been using Gymnastic Bodies https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/ for just a few months now, and I already feel more flexible and stronger than I have in years. Check it out GymnasticBodies.com/tim https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/, where you'll find the Fundamentals course for diagnosing your weakest areas, those you can tweak for fast improvements. It is incredible. Take a look at GymnasticBodies.com/tim https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/tim/ for more details and a large discount. This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service http://99designs.com/tim. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. When your business needs a logo, website, business card, thumbnail, or any other design, I recommend checking out 99designs. I use them myself. I've used them for many years. I use them to create book cover prototypes for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world, give your feedback, and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So check out some of my competitions in designs and some of your competitions in designs from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  design. So check it out, 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:13Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by GymnasticBodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment, and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Sommer on the podcast, who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed, and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming. I've been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I feel more flexible, stronger, and younger than I have in years. And it sounds cheesy to hear myself say that, but it's true. That's the hardest part to believe. And you can check it out,

• 1:52Tim Ferriss?

  gymnasticbodies.com/tim. If you go to that landing page, gymnasticbodies.com/tim, you can take a look at the fundamentals course, which will help you diagnose your weakest points, areas to improve, etc. And I highly encourage you to take a look at this body weight training system. It is incredible. gymnasticbodies.com/tim.

• 2:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to interview world-class performers and tease out the habits, routines, tools, tricks, et cetera, that you can use. This episode is a role reversal. I went to New York City, and I sat down with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame, and I was grilled. I was hit with all sorts of questions I had never heard before, and we had a blast doing it. We had so much fun. Their team did an incredible job with post-production and editing. I wanted to share it with all of you. And you can, of course, find Stephen and his team and his co-author at Freakonomics.com,

• 2:59Tim Ferriss?

  @Freakonomics on Twitter, and Freakonomics Radio in the podcast sphere. And without further preamble, please enjoy my wide-ranging, sometimes very odd, conversation with Stephen Dubner.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  If you don't try hard, no matter how much talent you have, there's always going to be someone else who has a similar amount of talent who outworks you and therefore outperforms you.

• 3:25Tim Ferriss?

  It's very easy, I think, in a digital age, easier than ever, to confuse being busy with being productive, and they're just not the same thing.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Well, what if I did something with some more passion? What if I found something to be of deeper interest to me? I thought, maybe, I should give it a go and see if it was actually possible to improve.

• 3:44Tim Ferriss?

  Let's start with, in 60 seconds or less, what you actually do in a given day, if you have such a thing as a given day.

• 3:52Tim Ferriss?

  I would say interviewing experts, tracking down eccentric weirdos who are really good at one thing or another, formulating a plan for some type of experiment involving their observations or findings, and then recording it. That is what I do most days. That is Tim Ferriss. He is... What is he exactly? I am a human guinea pig and professional dilettante.

• 4:20Speaker 05

  For our final self-improvement episode, a man whose entire life and career are one big pile of self-improvement, of accelerated self-improvement, as evidenced by his book titles, The Four Hour Work Week, The Four Hour Chef, The Four Hour Body. Tim Ferriss is in fact such a poster boy for self-improvement that you might be, as I first was, a bit suspicious. I'd seen your face, and I knew that you were the four-hour-blank guy. And of course, I assumed that you were a total charlatan.

• 4:52Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 4:53Speaker 05

  Right? Because that's...

• 4:54Tim Ferriss?

  How could you not with a title like that?

• 4:56Speaker 05

  Tim Ferriss, charlatan or self-improvement wizard? You'll be the judge, as we cover everything from his humble beginnings...

• 5:05Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, very much the runt of the litter in school.

• 5:07Speaker 05

  And some rough patches.

• 5:08Tim Ferriss?

  So I've had extended periods of depression that I've become better at mitigating over time.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  To his good fortune in startup investing.

• 5:18Tim Ferriss?

  Facebook also did very well.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  To the reason that millions of people do every single thing that Tim Ferriss tells them to do.

• 5:26Tim Ferriss?

  So the objective is to provide you with tools and principles for 10x-ing your hourly output.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Is there anyone here who isn't interested in 10x-ing their hourly output? Nah, I didn't think so.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 6:05Speaker 05

  Tim Ferriss recently stopped by our studio with a head full of ideas and, as you'll hear, a belly full of sardines.

• 6:14Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose my professional life can be split into writing, books that all sound like infomercial products, most notably The 4-Hour Work Week, and then tech investing.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  So if you had to pick a noun, or maybe two, to describe what you think of yourself as, what is the noun?

• 6:31Tim Ferriss?

  Noun would be teacher. I don't view myself as a writer, first and foremost. I always thought I was going to end up teaching ninth grade, specifically, because I had a lot of really formative influences, I think, at that fork in the road where a lot of crucial decisions are made by young folks. But I view my job as testing many, many different things, performing experiments, and then providing the Cliff Notes to people as a teacher.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Not long ago, you also started a podcast, which is called The Tim Ferriss Show. Now, why do you want to go and do a thing like that? Because we all know that podcasting is not where it's at.

• 7:04Tim Ferriss?

  It was intended to be a break between large book projects. And I have this nasty habit of writing long books. So The 4-Hour Chef was-

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Your books are big.

• 7:14Tim Ferriss?

  670 pages.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Your books are so weird, in the best way. They're not narrative from beginning to end. Even when they kind of feel a little bit like those self-help books with boxes and charts, you are just zany in a way that reminds me, I'll be honest with you, of one person more than anyone else, which was my mom. My mom was this kind of Brooklyn girl who ended up in upstate New York trying to be a pioneer woman and raise eight kids. And she did it. She had to figure out all this stuff. And that's what strikes me, is what you have this intense, either curiosity, or need, or something, to figure out stuff, and then tell other people about it, which is generous of you. Where does that come from? Why are you not satisfied with just being like everybody else?

• 7:58Tim Ferriss?

  I think the answer is twofold. So number one, my mom always encouraged me to march to my own drummer. So that was-

• 8:06Speaker 05

  How? How'd she do that?

• 8:08Tim Ferriss?

  She exposed me and my brother, I have one sibling, younger brother, to many, many different environments. My parents didn't have much money growing up, but they always had a budget for books and my mom would take us to experience things firsthand, like go to the beach and take leftover chicken bones and tie them to strings and fish for crabs, which we threw back. But the list just went on and on. And if we grasped on anything and became really passionate, then she would, and my father as well, put all their support behind that. And secondly, growing up, I was born premature and I was very, very small until about sixth grade.

• 8:44Speaker 05

  How small?

• 8:45Tim Ferriss?

  Small enough to get beat up at recess until sixth grade. I mean, very much the runt of the litter in school. And I was hyperactive, so my mom was looking for a solution to this and threw me into kid wrestling. So a kid wrestling program, weight class based. And I ended up embracing that as my primary sport and got to a national level towards the end of high school. And a big competitive advantage I have is that I studied the science of weight cutting. I got very good at losing weight and then regaining it. I was cutting from, say, 178, 178 pounds to 152 pounds.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  Whoa, which is how many classes, like four or five?

• 9:21Tim Ferriss?

  Quite a few, yeah. So I became an amateur scientist in studying the various approaches to weight loss and understanding what I had to do to maintain performance. So using, say, potassium sparing diuretics even, or something available over the counter, like a dandelion root. And so I think just to provide context for people, that is where I realized the benefits and risks and nuances of experimentation.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  You grew up in what many people know as the Hamptons, but not in a lifestyle that was what most people who think of the Hamptons think of the Hamptons lifestyle, right? You were townie essentially, right?

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, yeah. No white shorts and tennis rackets.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  What'd your folks do for a living?

• 10:04Tim Ferriss?

  My dad was a real estate broker and local real estate broker. Mom was and still is a physical therapist.

• 10:11Speaker 05

  And did you have jobs as a teenager and stuff like that?

• 10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. I worked as a primarily busboy.

• 10:18Tim Ferriss?

  At a place called Snowflake, which is now Bostwix. And then the lobster roll. A lot of people know the lobster roll. Or they might call it lunch, but no locals call it that. It's the lobster roll, which is now very well known because of the show The Affair.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  You're how old now?

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Thirty-eight.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  And what is your spousal or partnership status?

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Single.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Single. You do have a dog, though, right? Molly?

• 10:38Tim Ferriss?

  I do. I have a dependent. Molly is nine or 10 months old now.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  She travels with you?

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  She travels with me almost all the time.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  And I've heard you say that your food for her is dry kibble with sardine oil on top.

• 10:51Tim Ferriss?

  Drizzled over it, right? So I consume, after a conversation on my podcast with a scientist named Dominic D'Agostino, who's a ketogenesis, ketone expert, began consuming sardines in the mornings and found that if I'm traveling in particular, I often give Molly dehydrated, say, bison or a different wild game when I'm at home in San Francisco. But if I'm traveling, I can get her to eat dry kibble with the sardine oil drizzled on top of it. And it solves all sorts of dermatological issues, which I assume correspond to other types of health benefits internally.

• 11:26Speaker 05

  Right. And did you start eating sardines for the dermatological benefit yourself or more for the other components?

• 11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Other benefits.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Right, right. You eat them every day?

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  Almost every day.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  I eat sardines almost every day, too.

• 11:36Tim Ferriss?

  To the extent that I will travel, if I'm going to be gone for weeks, I will literally buy cases of sardines. They're the rats of the sea world, but they're small enough that they don't bioaccumulate as much, say, heavy metals as something like an albacore.

• 11:47Speaker 05

  I love that story. I hope it's true.

• 11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I'm choosing to believe that narrative.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  Ferris majored in East Asian Studies at Princeton, but he was always looking for business ideas as well. He opened some high-end gyms in Taiwan. He sold audiotapes of college admissions advice. Neither of those worked out. He had better luck teaching speed reading, but he got bored with that. Soon after graduation, he founded a company called Brain Quicken, which sold a nutritional supplement meant to, well, quicken your brain. And then Body Quick, which was pitched to athletes. Ferris says he was making a lot of money, but he was also badly overworked. So he took a leave of absence, went to Europe. He expected the company to tank in his absence. It didn't.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  Did even better without him, which made him wonder if the whole notion of working 40 and 60 and 80 hour weeks might be overrated.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  So, your first book, The Four Hour Work Week, I am curious, because, I don't know, the word I'm looking for is not fraud, but I'm pretty sure you work many more hours than four hours per week yourself, right? So, was that a prescription? Was it a wish? Or was it a kind of metaphor for what one needs to create?

• 13:05Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the objective of the book, for those people who haven't read it, and I'm sure many of the people have not, is to provide you with tools and principles for 10x-ing your hourly output. And the reason it's gained, I think, a foothold in the finance world with people like hedge fund managers, also with people in the startup world, CEOs of very large, fast-growing companies, is that they are looking for sources of leverage, right? To get more output for each input. The Four Hour Work Week title was one of 12 titles that I tested on Google AdWords. So, I created campaigns to test the respective titles and subtitles, and then just looked at the click-through rates, which went to under construction pages. And that performed the best of the options that I had.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  What came in second?

• 13:49Tim Ferriss?

  Second was...

• 13:52Speaker 05

  All right, better question. What was worst? Do you recall the bad ones?

• 13:55Tim Ferriss?

  The worst? The worst, I think, and I had a lot of bad ones, but it was like broadband and white sand or something.

• 14:04Speaker 05

  Wowzer.

• 14:04Tim Ferriss?

  Cheeseball, like that. And, but to talk about my sort of personal perspective, so that's the first context. And the second piece is, the book is not about being idle. It's about having control of your non-renewable resource, known as time, and then applying it how you want to.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  But the other kind of misperception of The Four Hour Work Week is that, especially because it's got a palm tree on the cover, right?

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. The objective is not to stare out into space rubbing cocoa butter on your belly for the rest of your life. It's about optimizing per hour output.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  So, the implication is, hey, you don't have to work so hard and you can still accomplish what you need to financially, whatever. But the real message of the book is... The way that we think about filling up our time with quote work, which is often less work and more just kind of garbage, is a silly way to think about the world.

• 14:52Tim Ferriss?

  I think that a lot of our assumptions are erroneous and misplaced and that we don't test them very well. So the, I think part of the reason that the book initially took off in the tech sphere, aside from the fact that I live in Silicon Valley, kind of right in the middle of the switch box, is that I talked about measurables. It was very much the language of startups. Like, what are your KPIs, your key performance indicators? What are the metrics that you're trying to improve? How do you do an analysis to determine where to focus? And it's very easy, I think, in a digital age, easier than ever, to confuse being busy with being productive, and they're just not the same thing. And doing something well does not make it important. So we sort of drive towards efficiency and

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  doing things quickly, oftentimes not stopping to assess whether or not the things we're doing are important in the first place.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  So one key piece of advice that you and a lot of other people have given over time is, you know, learning to be better at saying no to stuff, you know, especially as you start to succeed a little bit at whatever you're succeeding at in a firm, as an entrepreneur, as a writer, whatever, you know, more people ask you to do stuff, and it's kind of flattering, and you want to be nice, and you, I think the instinct for many people is to say yes, and all of a sudden you realize that like 80% of your good time is taken up by stuff that's, you know, is not so good. So considering that you're a big fan of no, and considering that you said not so long ago that one of your goals for the new year was to not do any media, what are you doing here today? This seems like this should be exactly the kind of thing you should not be doing.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, the goals move around, so I'd say there are two reasons I'm doing it. The first is that I am enjoying working on my own podcast, Tim Ferriss Show, and I think you're extremely good at what you do. So this is an opportunity for me to observe, interact, and get better at what I'm also doing.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  Good brown nosing, okay.

• 16:43Tim Ferriss?

  With my own time, so that's right. So I'll start with the flattery, and then the second reason is that when I really drilled down, I realized the vast majority of my time, which I felt was ill-spent, was being consumed by startups. And so about six months ago, published a, what is it, in effect, a resignation letter.

• 17:05Tim Ferriss?

  A retirement letter.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  Right, you went celibate, really?

• 17:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I went startup celibate.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  And we should say, these were startups you were not participating, you were participating as investor primarily, correct?

• 17:16Tim Ferriss?

  Investor and advisor, which implies and carries with it much more responsibility in terms of being at the beck and call of various founders or otherwise people related to startups. So that, by stemming the flow of, say, cold introductions via email and whatnot related to startups, I was able to reclaim a large portion of the pie that represented my total work hours.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  As an early investor in startups, Ferris had already had a number of what he calls lucky bets.

• 17:53Speaker 05

  Was Uber one of the lucky bets?

• 17:54Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely, although that's still a private company.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Facebook was another?

• 17:58Tim Ferriss?

  Facebook also did very well.

• 18:00Speaker 05

  How early, how early were you in?

• 18:01Tim Ferriss?

  A few years before the IPO, Alibaba, Twitter, about 20 or so other bets, 70 in total, probably.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  And why'd you want to go cold turkey on that? Was it that you had enough money? Was it that you were sick of that whole either group of people or that kind of idea? Was it you just wanted a change? Was it that you wanted to do other things?

• 18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'll give you the short version. I mean, it's probably a 10-page, I wouldn't call it a screed, but list of reasons.

• 18:26Speaker 05

  It was a little screedy.

• 18:27Tim Ferriss?

  It was a little screedy, but the primary reasons are, number one, I realized that in today's environment, I was, in many ways, replaceable as an investor. In other words, there's such a surplus of capital that if I said no, there are going to be 10 other people in line to say yes, even if the terms were outrageously unfavorable and dangerous. And if people were price shopping, meaning looking for highest valuations or taking money off the table and nothing more, it made it very difficult and unpleasant for me to do a good job as a responsible investor, even if I'm not using other people's money and only my own. The second reason is, I think, the The dynamics right now in the market are such that it's extremely difficult for

• 19:09Tim Ferriss?

  me, as a single person doing this part-time, to filter the signal from the noise. And what I realize is, I don't do moderation well. So it's much more effective, in fact, required for me to say, "I'm not doing any deals, period, zero."

• 19:27Speaker 05

  I'm curious, do you think that, as a strategy, would be useful to a lot of people in spheres having nothing to do with investing?

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hugely valuable, absolutely. If you look at behavioral modification, and you look at, say, the work of BJ Fogg at Stanford or otherwise, I think that cold turkey is oftentimes much more effective than trying to titrate back and moderate, particularly when you're dealing with compulsive or addictive behavior.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  On the other hand, it may be that the people that we learn about who were successful at cold turkey are the disciplined people, and that the ones that we don't hear about so much are the ones who try it, and then backslide a little bit, and then they're back to where they were.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. I think there's absolutely the risk of a survivorship bias, right? Just like mutual funds that advertise their performance in magazine A, B, and C, you don't hear about the losers, which is why...

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Look at the Dow Jones. Look at the stocks that are in the Dow Jones. I mean, we should all have the ability that Dow Jones Industrial Average has to get rid of the ones that hurt our average.

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Or the people who are lionized on magazine covers for, like, saying no to a billion-dollar acquisition offer and taking it to 20 billion. Well, you don't hear about the losers because the story isn't as interesting, it's not going to sell as many copies.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Ferris is what you might call a serial obsessionist. At the moment, one of his obsessions is lucid dreaming.

• 20:44Tim Ferriss?

  So lucid dreaming is very demonstrable in a lab, and it is the phenomenon of becoming conscious of the fact that you're dreaming when you're dreaming. And you can cultivate the ability to trigger this, which allows you to do some very interesting things.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  What do you need to do, whether physiologically or chemically or whatever, to prepare for lucid dreaming?

• 21:05Tim Ferriss?

  Well, physiologically, having a basic understanding of sleep cycles is helpful.

• 21:15Tim Ferriss?

  If you can wake yourself during a REM cycle, stay awake for, say, 10 to 15 minutes, and then go back to sleep, that will oftentimes increase the frequency of inducing lucidity. If you wanted to get a little out there, there are some people who take, for instance, huperzine A, which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, prior to sleep in the belief that it facilitates lucid dreaming.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  Have you tried it?

• 21:43Tim Ferriss?

  I have. Difficult to say if that is causal or placebo or otherwise, but seems to be a plausible mechanism.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  If I understand correctly, you once nearly attempted suicide. I don't know exactly what that means.

• 22:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. Yeah, at Princeton.

• 22:02Speaker 05

  Can you tell me, do you want to tell me a little bit about that?

• 22:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, we could talk about it. And this experience, I should underscore, is not uncommon at a lot of these pressure cookers in terms of universities. There's just a confluence of what I perceive to be major negative life events all at once, including incredible difficulty with senior thesis and thesis advisor at Princeton. And I approached the administration about taking a year off to focus on testing a few different jobs because I felt like I was being funneled into the Goldman Sachs and McKinsey's of the world, and I knew that wasn't a fit for me. Secondarily, I was like, let me take the time necessary to do a good job on my thesis. And was told two things. First, by my senior thesis advisor, oh, you're just going to cop out. This better be the best thesis I've ever seen.

• 22:49Tim Ferriss?

  Or, in fact, I'm going to give you a bad grade, which was a huge percentage of your departmental GPA for the entire time in your undergraduate education. And then, secondly, when I went to the people I thought would be willing to help because of this purported focus on undergraduate education and health and whatnot, I was told in no uncertain terms that that tenured professor would never do such a thing. And that was the end of the conversation. So I felt really trapped in a corner.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  Did you plan it? Did you envision it?

• 23:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I did.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  Were you depressed?

• 23:21Tim Ferriss?

  I was, and it seems to run in the males in my family on both sides. So I've had extended periods of depression that I've become better at mitigating over time. But the most important thing that I have ever written, I think, is some practical thoughts on suicide, a long post on this. I really think it's the most important thing I've ever written.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  I see that you are or have crowdfunded a study about treating depression with psilocybin, right, at Johns Hopkins. Is that related to your own experience?

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  Very much related, yeah. So I think that, and I'm going to be doing more at Johns Hopkins, I've also funded some neuroscience studies at UCSF, and will be doing more at a number of different universities, most likely including NYU, in fact.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  I'm curious, having been depressed and thinking about suicide in the past, how do you think about depression in the future? Is it something that you kind of feel you're forestalling constantly, or is it not a feature of your daily life?

• 24:19Tim Ferriss?

  It's not something I'm as fearful of anymore. I think that I've identified tools, including judicious supervised use of what we would typically call psychedelics, entheogens, which is the new branding, perhaps, that scientifically, and just based on the preliminary data and published data, have tremendous promise for addressing treatment-resistant depression. I mean, beyond anyone's wildest expectations. That would be one tool. I also think that preventatively focusing on daily or weekly habits that prevent depression is really the ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure.

• 25:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's very hard, when your mind goes into this sort of depression logic that is self-defeating, to pull yourself out of it. So, certain types of exercise, oftentimes related to balance or acrobatics, anything that where you're moving your body through space as opposed to a weight around your body. Secondly, meditation. I meditate almost every morning for 20 minutes, roughly.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Evening as well, I know.

• 25:27Tim Ferriss?

  Less so in the evenings, but I do have mindfulness. This practices in the evening and then nutrition. There are a few key sort of cornerstone elements that if I control will not prevent me from ever being depressed, but will mitigate it tremendously. And what I've also come to accept is I do think that it's very common among people who try to create anything original. I think that it's very hard to have the kind of manic ups that allow you to see connections between seemingly unrelated dots without having some troughs. It's I'm not and maybe that's just rationalizing and accepting depression, but it's it's very

• 26:08Tim Ferriss?

  hard for me to find people in that type of profession who don't have this pendulum.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  It's interesting because a lot of people talk about the relationship between the two creativity and depression, but as if the arrow is traveling in one way, which is that depressed people, you know, people like to look at, say, look at 100 very, very creative people and look at the incidence of depression seems to be higher than among the general population. But you're suggesting potentially, I guess, that there's a causal arrow maybe moving in the other direction, which is if you choose to be a creative type person, you're engaging in an activity of kind of reinventing, you know, a blank page every day that inevitably might produce highs that might also be accompanied by, you know, periods of of real mental drought.

• 26:53Tim Ferriss?

  I think so, and this is just from my own personal experience and observations of friends who are also writers or songwriters or whatever it might be. The more time you spend in your own head, I think, the higher just this probabilistically, the more likely you are to latch on to some weird circular reasoning. But I don't romanticize depression in that way that, for instance, some musicians fetishize drug use. They're like, well, you know, you do your best work when you're on coke and heroin and all this stuff. It brings out the muse and so on. I think that's a dangerous logic.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  Well, I appreciate you're talking about it because, you know, it strikes me as a huge paradox, suicide particularly, but depression also, which is that, you know, suicide is is rather prominent in in the West and particularly in the US, you know, more people die from suicide. Than by murder, easily, more than double. And yet, because there's the taboo around it, we don't talk about it much, in part for fear of triggering it. On the other hand, the downside of that is if you can't poke around at something, especially empirically, it's hard to learn about it and hard to learn what leads people to it.

• 27:56Tim Ferriss?

  Totally. I do think, taking kind of a left turn, that if people spend, and this is going to sound simplistic, but the solutions don't have to be complex to perceived complex problems. More time in nature and less reactivity from all of the notifications and push messages and so on that we're bombarded with solves a lot of these problems. It really does. It's like, go lift heavy objects and get out, walk barefoot in nature, play with a dog, and meditate in the morning.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  That's why you travel with your dog.

• 28:32Tim Ferriss?

  One of the reasons, yeah, one of the reasons. Get my head out of my own ass and actually focus on something besides myself.

• 28:43Speaker 05

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, Tim Ferriss answers our frequently asked questions, including, what do you do when a panhandler asks you for money?

• 28:51Tim Ferriss?

  I do not give money, and I'll tell you why.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  We talk about nutrition trends, past and present.

• 28:56Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, like, rice cakes? You might as well just inject yourself with insulin.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  And do us a favor. If you like Freakonomics Radio, tell three friends about it right now. Go on, I'll wait.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter, an entrepreneur, an investor, a writer. He has a podcast called The Tim Ferriss Show. He's tried some TV.

• 29:27Tim Ferriss?

  I spent a period of time in Japan for this ill-fated TV show that did not take off, and I had a week to attempt to learn Japanese horseback archery.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  Which has to be pretty easy, right?

• 29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Horses can sense fear and get spooked easily, so I have to slow down my breathing and remain calm. Because if this horse gets it into mind to throw me, I'm not going to have much say in it at all.

• 29:58Tim Ferriss?

  Not easy.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  You're just riding fast.

• 30:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, galloping with no reins and pulling an arrow off your back and shooting at these little targets the size of dinner plates.

• 30:07Speaker 05

  There was another TV show that also didn't work out, at least as planned. It was called The Tim Ferriss Experiment. He shot a whole season, 13 episodes, for a network that later changed its mind. In each episode, Ferriss would spend just a few days trying to learn a new skill: rock and roll drumming, rally car racing, golf. One episode was called Urban Evasion and Escape.

• 30:31Tim Ferriss?

  To tap into my inner escape artist, I'll be following Kevin's lead and learning a broad spectrum of skills: how to escape custody, blend into my environment, lose the tail, pick locks, and finally, jump or boost a getaway car.

• 30:46Speaker 05

  The show was made for a new TBS platform called Upwave, which got shut down shortly after Ferriss's show started airing.

• 30:53Tim Ferriss?

  Everything got put in the vault, and there was a regime change. Sayonara, you're out of luck. But I was able to license that back and distribute it myself on iTunes, which was very successful beyond my wildest expectations. I was asked recently by a network executive, what did you learn from your various experiences in these different media? And my answer was, fund it yourself. If you don't finance it, you don't control it, at the end of the day. And that has become easier and easier to do with tools like Kickstarter, with options, even for orphaned content.

• 31:30Speaker 05

  All right, so, Tim, let's tackle some of our patented, frequently asked questions. Feel free to give an expansive answer. Feel free to give a lightning round answer. There's no right or wrong way to do these. Name the handful, or maybe it's more than a handful, of things that you do, whether it's rituals, whether it's diet, sleep, exercise, whatever, things that you do to kind of keep yourself functional and happy and moving forward every day.

• 31:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I wake up probably somewhere between 8:30 and 10:00 AM. I tend to stay up late. I sit down and meditate for 20 minutes.

• 32:08Tim Ferriss?

  Then I brew tea, which is typically pu-erh tea with turmeric and ginger added to it, to which I add coconut oil, which is high in medium-chain triglycerides, which the brain likes very much. I consume that as I sit down and journal. There are two different journals that I'm currently using. The Five Minute Journal, just created by a reader of mine, in fact, really, really helpful for setting the tone and focus for the day. And then Morning Pages, which is really just a free association exercise. Good way to trap your monkey mind on paper so it doesn't distract you and sabotage you for the rest of the day.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

  And between that point and lunch, these days I'm often skipping breakfast, I will focus on creative, hopefully creative, production or synthesis. So, writing, recording, exploring. And if I have any type of admin or housekeeping metaphorically to deal with, that is done in the afternoon. I'd say that's generally the routine. I, every night, have a very hot soaking bath. No bubbles, no jets, that's sacrilegious.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  What is one thing you own that you should throw out but probably never will?

• 33:27Tim Ferriss?

  The wooden shards of the targets that I hit when I was doing the Japanese horse bike archery.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Do you have them displayed or just stuffed in a drawer?

• 33:34Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, they are respectively placed on a shelf, and I have no idea what I'm gonna do with them.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Sounds like you're gonna keep them.

• 33:42Tim Ferriss?

  I think I might give them away to people at some point. They have such a strong meaning for me, that would definitely be high on the list. I also have notebooks, just bookshelves and bookshelves of notebooks where I've recorded, for instance, almost all my workouts since I was about 16. I don't think I need those.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  What's your favorite sport to play and favorite sport to watch?

• 34:04Tim Ferriss?

  Favorite sport to play? Competitive sport?

• 34:08Speaker 05

  What is an example of a non-competitive sport? Isn't it then not a sport?

• 34:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's fair enough.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  No, I'm curious to know.

• 34:17Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there's a related.

• 34:20Speaker 05

  Like kite flying, although we used to have kite fights when I was a kid.

• 34:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, acro yoga is something that I'm currently really delving into. It's a combination of, in effect, yoga, acrobatics and Cirque du Soleil type performances. The sports that I am best at or have been best at are generally those that I enjoy. I don't like being really bad at things.

• 34:41Speaker 05

  Welcome to the club.

• 34:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Speaker 05

  You're visiting New York now, which you do pretty regularly. It's not uncommon to run into someone on the street asking for money. So it seems like everybody over the course of their life develops some kind of standard strategy for that scenario. What's yours?

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  I do not give money, and I'll tell you why. I, at one point, paid a homeless gentleman in San Francisco to give me a tour of the entire homeless underground in San Francisco.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  Would you pay?

• 35:11Tim Ferriss?

  It was through a service called Viable, V-A-Y-A-B-L-E. It was maybe, I don't know, 50, 100 bucks, something like that. And he was very explicit. He said he should never give homeless people money. And he showed me exactly where they know.

• 35:25Speaker 05

  Right, says the homeless guy who's getting paid by the agency, right?

• 35:28Tim Ferriss?

  So, right, you have to take that into account. But he walked me through the Tenderloin, through all these different areas. And he pointed out where to get clothing, where to get housing, where to get blankets, where to get food, where to get all these resources. And he said, anyone who is asking for money is doing so to buy drugs or alcohol.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Tim, what is something that you believed for a long time to be true until you found out you were wrong?

• 35:53Tim Ferriss?

  I believed for a very long time as an athlete that low-fat, high-carbohydrate was an optimal diet.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  Not just you, brother.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I think there's a decent amount of evidence, circumstantial or direct, to suggest that low-fat diets create a host of issues, ranging from joint problems to amenorrhea, like the cessation of menstruation. I mean, it's, I think, entirely unnatural for sedentary people or for athletes.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  And also, when you... Orbid people or discourage people from consuming a thing, whether in that case it's fat or it could be, you know, anything that you can think of. It's not like most people will instead consume nothing. They'll consume more of something else. So the compliment, right? And in this case, the compliment was a lot of carbs and a lot of sugars that contributed to, if we believe the science that we're reading today, contributed to all kinds of chronic and underlying problems.

• 36:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, like rice cakes? Might as well just inject yourself with insulin.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  So I'm curious, when I read The Four Hour Chef, it strikes me that you're a very adventurous chef and eater. But when I hear you talk about your nutrition now, I am curious what you actually would put on a plate and put in your mouth. So if we were to leave this radio studio and say, hey, let's go get something to eat, where would we go and what would you eat?

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not purist about it, because I also know how to biochemically limit the damage that I might create. So if we wanted to go out and have sushi and eat several pounds of rice, I could do that. It wouldn't cause me any existential angst. But in gen-

• 37:31Speaker 05

  What would be your optimal meal? We're in New York, there are many choices.

• 37:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, optimal meal, I would say, would be grass-fed steak with vegetables, maybe some lentils for fiber.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  I'm down with that, no problem.

• 37:42Tim Ferriss?

  And I can go out and people, it is not clear to anyone eating with me that I am on a stranger restrictive diet when I order at a restaurant.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Small question here. What is the best possible future invention or discovery for humankind?

• 37:58Tim Ferriss?

  I would, best possible, the first thing that comes to mind is functional safety precautions related to artificial intelligence, which I think is very difficult.

• 38:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure is.

• 38:13Tim Ferriss?

  How do you create sort of stop-gap rip chords for-

• 38:19Tim Ferriss?

  An intelligence that is by definition intended to get to the point where it can do several million hours of human computation in the span of minutes or hours.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  So I talk to people about it, I read about it, but it's really hard for me to understand the contours of it. But the catch 22 part it seems to me is, we want it to be good enough to be so good that we would be secondary, we would be the animals that somehow managed to create a better intelligence and therefore expendable.

• 38:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, it's

• 38:49Speaker 05

  Maybe we could be pets.

• 38:50Tim Ferriss?

  This is a very, very prevalent and intense conversation among technologists right now. And there are those, of course, who believe that it's summoning the demon and so on. There are those who think it will be a panacea. And there are those who believe it could be both. I tend to fall in that latter group. I mean, I do think that artificial intelligence could solve potentially the greatest dilemmas of our time.

• 39:16Speaker 05

  Which you would name as what? The fact that we die too early, the fact that we

• 39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, you name it, I think. Space colonization or some variant thereof, climate change, world hunger, warfare or elimination thereof. I mean, it's impossible to conceive of not only the solutions that AI would find to known problems, but the problems it would identify that we haven't even noticed yet.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  I have no idea what even the next five years will bring, though, in AI, much less 20 years from now. Maybe you do.

• 39:45Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I have some guesses, most of which I probably can't talk about. But I would say that

• 39:50Speaker 05

  What do you mean you can't talk about them? Because you know them to be true?

• 39:52Tim Ferriss?

  No, because they're

• 39:54Speaker 05

  You've told someone you won't break the promise?

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's right, the latter. Just proprietary information from companies. But I would say this, imagine that a nuclear bomb or bits and bytes that could be transmitted through any broadband

• 40:06Speaker 05

  Meaning replicable and scalable in a way that something physical like that is not.

• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's right. That is far more uncontainable than a closely tracked amount of uranium or plutonium.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Mm hmm. That's a very sobering note on which to end. So let's not end there. All right, last question. If you had a time machine, and it sounds like you may know people who have time machines. Uh, when would you travel to and why? And what would you do there?

• 40:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm tempted to say that I would travel back in time to eliminate some dictator or tyrant or someone.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Everybody, everybody do that. Other people would take care of that.

• 40:45Tim Ferriss?

  Other people will take care of that. So my knee jerk response is I would go back.

• 40:48Speaker 05

  You can also go into the future. I'm just.

• 40:50Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think I would go to the future. I would go back in time and have a lot of drinks with Ben Franklin.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  You do love Ben Franklin, I know. And there's a lot of reasons to love him, but tell me why him?

• 41:00Tim Ferriss?

  Because he wasn't afraid to be an amateur. And as an amateur with beginner's mind, I think, a fresh pair of eyes, he was able to create many, many breakthroughs in multiple fields that have shaped civilization and the world as we know it today. And he was also, though, at the same time, a bit of a merry prankster and a bit of a showman. And I just really enjoy that combination, being able to accomplish very big, serious objectives while not taking yourself too seriously is something I aspire to.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  Well done, Tim Ferriss. Thanks for coming in.

• 41:38Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you.

• 41:45Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 42:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 42:49Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by GymnasticBodies.com. This is the training system that I am most obsessed with at the moment, and I don't get paid any commissions or anything like that. You may have heard Coach Sommer on the podcast, who designed the program, former national team coach for men's gymnastics. I am not easily impressed, and I've just been completely blown away by the sophistication of his programming and the elegance of his programming. I've been using Gymnastic Bodies for just a few months now, and I feel more flexible, stronger, and younger than I have in years. And it sounds cheesy to hear myself say that, but it's true. That's the hardest part to believe. And you can check it out, gymnasticbodies.com/tim.

• 43:31Tim Ferriss?

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• 44:14Tim Ferriss?

  I've also used them for banner ads, illustrations, and much more. With 99designs, you get a variety of original designs from designers around the world. Give your feedback, and then pick your favorite. Your happiness is guaranteed. So check out some of my competitions and designs, and some of your competitions and designs, from fellow Tim Ferriss Show listeners, at 99designs.com/tim. And right now, you can get a free $99 upgrade on your first design. So check it out, 99designs.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.